With Astro’s feature set and templates, I converted and redesigned my blog in a few hours
This weekend I took down my old WordPress blog and replaced it with a new static site built with Astro.
It all started when I could not access my WordPress admin area. After many hours of trying to set up a working user, I gave up.
I had heard Astro was a great choice for static sites, and it definitely is. It has features that you might think only work with a database and a server: search, indexing by tag and RSS. Here is a breakdown.
Things I like:
- Starter template has everything I need including sensible styling, clean layout, and icons.
- Clear, extensive instructions on how to make common changes
- Comes with code syntax highlighting built in
- Hot reloading is very nice and very quick
- Comes with a workflow to deploy to Cloudflare Pages
- Looks good on mobile out of the box
Things I dislike:
- Tailwind CSS. I really love traditional CSS and grew up with the philosophy that CSS Zen Garden espouses. So coming in, I was skeptical of Tailwind. It turned out to be way worse than I thought. It feels like a whole new programming language with esoteric variable and function names. And it takes so much longer to figure out where and what to change to give the desired look. 0/10 would not recommend. I have no clue how it could work in a large team.
- Using a custom font requires changing values in several places
Overall, it’s been great and I look forward to writing articles regularly again!